One of the cool aspects of writing for an ezine is you get to see how many people click on your articles.

If you have nearly 275 or more of them, as I do right now, you can go back in time and see how your predictions worked out.

Did the "surefire winners,” that you predicted, in terms of readership, actually turn out that way?

What happened to the ones that you didn't think highly of? You know, the ones you more or less banged out, that were kind of lightweight, in your opinion; how did they fare?

Here are some of my findings:

(1) Some of the predicted winners are just that. I felt it when I wrote them, and they held up, and continue to grow in readership.

(2) Sometimes, I can be dead wrong; more often than I care to admit. For example, in my consulting and coaching work, I know if I offer a performance guarantee of some kind, I'll increase sales. I've proven this over the course of many years, and so it is very valuable information for other professionals and businesspeople, from my viewpoint.

But articles about offering guarantees just aren't that popular. Again, to me, if I can build sales by 20% or more with a simple tool such as this, I think it's a breakthrough, but I find I'm in rare company.

(3) Never underestimate the appeal of "easy” and the daunting nature of complicated or difficult. Perhaps this is why we see so many articles with the words, simple, fast, effortless, and free in the titles. When I have simplified a topic to its essentials, people flock to it, but if it sounds like a graduate school course in the esoteric, forget it.

(4) The best thing in the world is to write what's on your mind at that moment, post it or submit it for publication, and then forget about it. Move on to the next one. If I write five articles in a day, one of them will be a winner, in readership, but I seldom know which one, in advance. So, produce a high volume and the numbers will work for you.

(5) There are "sleepers.” These are articles that do poorly for some time, and then slowly but steadily catch on, sometimes surpassing the fast-starters. They find their audiences, but it takes a while.

When

it comes to predicting success, nobody is right all the time, and I'm wondering if we can even be on the mark most of the time. But, it may not matter.

In this article I've been discussing readership, and this is only one dimension of success. If you have only a few, but they're the right ones for you, then you could also be a big winner.

For instance, I can trace over a million dollars of consulting to one of my book readers in Tacoma, Washington. He handed my book to his VP of Sales & Marketing, who hired me to do a project, and this led to an even larger one, and so on.

Yes, that book has sold over 100,000 copies, but it took just one reader to make it a success from an "after-market” standpoint.

So, balance all of your objectives, select the right measures of success, and assess what you've accomplished. But don't try to get too smart in predicting success or failure, because that's largely out of our hands once our work has been published!

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